Reading A Sex Story To An Old Woman
The wind bit into my neck like an angry dog with teeth of ice. If I could, I would have bitten back. But fighting my way up Fifth Avenue through the blizzard was already taking up all the energy I had. As for my spirit, let me just say that it was already April and winter simply was not letting up. If global warming didn’t kick in soon, I was going to punch another hole in the ozone layer myself. I suppose I would’ve been in a bad mood even if it had been seventy degrees and sunny. My chosen line of work, doing voiceovers for radio and television commercials, wasn’t paying the bills like it used to. There’d been a time when my phone was ringing off the hook with offers for work. But these things go in cycles, and lately there’d been a new set of voices in demand, and mine wasn’t one of them. So when I read in the newspaper about an organisation that arranged for volunteers to read to senior citizens who could no longer read for themselves, I decided to give it a try. It sounded like a good way to forget my own troubles for a few hours a week, and to keep my voice in shape while waiting for my career to pick up again. That’s how I’d come to know Alice. She was 83 years old, and friendly enough, although she didn’t say much. She enjoyed having me read aloud to her, but mostly I think she just liked having company in the afternoon while her daughter and son-in-law were at work. She always offered me tea and snacks and did her best to make me feel as though I was visiting a friend and not just some ‘old lady on the Upper East Side’, which is how she sometimes referred to herself. Read the rest of this entry »
